When we moved into our new office building earlier this year, we gave over a portion of the lobby space to a very talented individual: Patti Reiko Osebold. An origami artist from Spokane—and a dear friend—Patti graciously created 31 red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis) for an installation entitled Flight of the Grus japonensis on Pacific. Throughout east Asia, the cranes are a symbol of longevity, good fortune, and love.
Thanks to Chad Ramsey for his beautiful portrait of the artist.
On a recent trip to Hecla Mining Company’s Lucky Friday mine in Mullan, Idaho, photographer Jim Van Gundy takes a breather before heading underground. We’ve teamed up with Jim, a Spokane-based shooter, on several Hecla projects over the last 25 years. He’s one of the most experienced mining photographers in North America: a hard-working professional who knows his way around gritty environments—and who will go to any length to capture beautiful images. And, as you can see, a guy who thrives on a little danger.
On a recent trip to Casa Barardi – Hecla Mining Company’s gold property in western Quebec, we enlisted the help of Montreal-based aerial copter company VuDuCiel. We had them flying a six-blade drone copter with a DSLR camera mount outdoors; they used a smaller copter for indoor shooting. Standing in front of Casa’s headframe is operator Jean-Francois Vermette (left) and his camera operator and sidekick Julien Gramigna. They spoke pretty good English and were a pleasure to work with. When asked to perform some death-defying maneuvers, they always responded with an enthusiastic “Oui oui!” Merci, gentlemen.
It’s dark, hot, musty, and noisy. Other than that, working at an underground mine site is a piece of cake.
We recently spent a week traveling to Hecla Mining Company’s gold property, Casa Berardi, to shoot both photos and film footage. Located in Quebec roughly 500 miles northwest of Montreal, Casa sits in a remote area where cell service doesn’t exist and English is mixed in with a lot of French. Above, photographer Jim Van Gundy (left) watches Jim Swoboda of ILF Media prep a shot.
Oh, I almost forgot: Don’t load up on the coffee in the morning, because you won’t find any port-a-potties underground either.
I prefer not to categorize books. Like music, they’re either good or bad, and discussions about genres and sub-genres tend to illuminate the critic rather than the author.
However…
I think that, within the “good” camp, it’s somewhat helpful to separate the page-turners (pretty much anything Stephen King writes) from the profound—like, say, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It’s not that King can’t write beautifully when he wants to. To cite just one example, there are several passages in “The Body,” a novella included in the book Different Seasons, that gave me pause. But let’s not kid ourselves: Robinson occupies an entirely different plane of existence.
There’s a point to all this, I promise.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, and, well…it’s remarkable. It might be the first book I’ve ever read that somehow strikes an appropriate balance between compelling, hard-to-put-down story and meaningful disquisition on the utter strangeness of our existence…
“Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people’s lives be so convoluted?”
…and on the anguish of love.
“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
I’ll be thinking about Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki for a very long time.
Experts in West Africa are predicting as many as 1.4 million new cases of Ebola by January. The CDC is “doubling down” on outreach and training. Siddhartha Mukherjee warns that “even if every system in place to identify suspected carriers had been working perfectly, [Thomas Eric Duncan] may have still set off a mini-epidemic in Dallas.”
Don’t worry, though: the Washington Post is on it, answering the questions everyone else is afraid to ask.
I was in Seattle Monday and Tuesday, in town to see the final show of the King Crimson Elements tour. Tickets went on sale June 6 at 10 a.m.; by 10:03 I’d purchased two—one for me, the other for my 17-year-old son. The four-month wait was almost unbearable, but for two glorious hours, from “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One” to a blistering encore of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” well…all was right with the world.
Tony Levin took some photographs after the show. Think you can spot me in the crowd? Tell you what: I’ll send you a bag of official helveticka blend coffee if you’re successful.
Letterheads, we make them all the time here at helveticka. However, I think if you asked a random 20-something (i.e. one of my peers) they would have no idea what one was. But for those in the know there is a rather rabid underground culture celebrating and sharing the classic (and sometimes no so classic) letterheads of the past. The hub for all things letterhead is a tumblr blog called Letterheady.
Letterheady showcases mainly famous persons or organizations, with the occasional President thrown in for good measure. They pluck letterheads from just about every corner of the entertainment, art, design, and business world. Not to mention a rather impressive swath of time, ranging from the late 1800s all the way to the present.
Take a look at their blog, there are some really great ones to check out. Below are a few more of my favorites.
Well, I do think this letterhead from Richard Simmons, circa 2009, has to be to be the all time greatest though!
Anna Della Subin asks the tough questions:
“[I]f procrastination is so clearly a society-wide, public condition, why is it always framed as an individual, personal deficiency? Why do we assume our own temperaments and habits are at fault—and feel bad about them—rather than question our culture’s canonization of productivity?”
Sing it, sister.
Though we originally ran this post back in July, it seemed appropriate, given the content of our latest news release, to share it again.
We recently completed a project for Providence Health Care Foundation. It’s an installation that both celebrates Holy Family Hospital’s 50-year anniversary and commemorates the Dominican Sisters who founded it in 1964. The sisters, who arrived in the area in 1925, also faithfully served communities like Tonasket, Omak, Kettle Falls, Colville, and my home town of Chewelah.
On Wednesday, July 23, the appropriately humble Dominican Heritage Art Wall was officially unveiled to an enthusiastic crowd—including my mom, who has enjoyed a lifelong friendship with many of the sisters. What a treat to work on a project honoring all 42 of them, whose names appear in the display as quietly as they served our region.
“The trouble with writing,” concludes Michelle Huneven, “is writing.” Truer words were never spoken.
But wait—there’s more: “Writing is difficult in the beginning, difficult in the middle and difficult at the end.” And it’s “a weird, lonely occupation with only intermittent and unpredictable satisfactions and rewards.” And “no matter how many times you do it, you start out every time with the sick sense that you don’t know what you’re doing.”
My favorite line, though? “Some writers think their work can’t be improved, or shouldn’t be edited at all. More of us pingpong between grandiosity and despair.”
It’s like she knows me.
Happy National Punctuation Day, everyone.
What…you didn’t get me anything? Not to worry: you can make up for it by leaving your nominations for Punctuation Mark of the Year in the comments field below. If you feel like sending a gift anyway, keep in mind that I’m running low on bourbon—thanks in part to reading that, “in most cases, rules about apostrophe usage only serve to irritate those people who know the rules and confuse those who do not.” Egad.
From Mad no. 154 (October 1972): “The Mad Guide to Political Types.”
The terrifying tale of The Hound of Mons has everything: A German scientist, mutilated victims, and the brain of a madman implanted in a bloodthirsty hellhound.
CK sends along this link, the contents of which I find to be equal parts creative, hilarious, and horrifying. Before you click, keep in mind that you can’t un-see it.
If—and that’s a mighty big “if”—the lab results stand up to peer review, this is extraordinary.
Gasp! It’s the Black Beast of Harborough! (Though, to be fair, when it’s described as a “black animal shaped like a medium-sized dog,” there’s a pretty good chance it’s, you know…a dog. But still.)
A recent visit to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle proved to be a treat. A series of interactive exhibits, housed within their visitor center, features the good work of the foundation. It’s an amazing display of their mission and purpose—and a straightforward look at the fundamental problems facing people around the globe. Designed by Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects and in collaboration with Studio Matthews, the foundation’s innovative displays, use of materials, and poignant storytelling is well worth the visit. And to top it all off, it’s free.
There’s a quiz over at pbs.org that purports to determine what font you are. It’s a multiple-choice thing with really dumb answers to choose from. (In fact, I can’t think of a single instance in which my actual response was an option.) Nevertheless, according to PBS, I’m Helvetica.
Curious.
I’d better get a second opinion, I thought. So I checked with Buzzfeed, who promptly declared that I’m Times New Roman.
Worried that these results pointed to a latent bipolar disorder, I headed over to Pentagram. Their authority is unimpeachable; their judgment, therefore, could be nothing other than final.
The result? I am, it turns out…Baskerville Italic: “well-read, a little short-sighted, and tend to lean quietly but firmly towards the Right.” I can live with that.